Run For Your Life!

I really enjoyed the piece. In the absence of a stated intent, I'd say it felt quite solid and a fun listen. But to be honest the pace and some of the notes signaled more of a quirky cat-and-mouse chase where the fugitive isn't necessarily innocent but is outwitting the authorities in the chase. I didn't get the sense of a life threatening desperation.

I tried to transcribe a little bit to figure out why I felt that way. Right from the start you've got a strong and clear pattern in trombone doing D-F-A-B and I totally heard it as a D minor. From that pattern I heard the rest of the piece based on Dm. But at 0:07 you introduce a chromatic figure here and throughout that contains F# which came across with a hint of quirky which to me worked against the goal of desperation. It wasn't until after several more listens that I caught the timpani doing what may have been B notes in the beginning statement. So then I replayed the whole thing while I held down a low B on my MIDI brass ensemble and it completely changed the quirkiness nature into something more sinister.

So if you meant it in D, then to me it came across with a hint of quirkiness rather than desperation. If you meant it in B, I think you achieved your stated story goal, but you may need to give some power to the B because the tonality of the timpani isn't conveying it well.

Thanks for sharing the piece. Hope this helps.

 

There are a lot of his manuscripts on Youtube. Study them.

That's fantastic you are an Aerospace Engineer. Most likely you are a normal person, and have a healthy outlook towards life.

I am a profession orchestrator and composer..... so I don't !!! Ha !

What I am trying to say, in the nicest way possible, is you have only scratched the surface. I don't have time to go into all the reasons.
But I can point you in the direction I feel you need to go.

Study how Hermann uses, and hides, repetition. Don't worry about the note choices, or half diminished or minor/major 7th harmonies. Those won't
get you far other than sounding like him.

 

I think we can safely delete "possibly"

That's great ! In fact I bet your engineering let's you think a lot like hermann.

I would HIGHLY recommend giving the piece I am attaching below a good listen. Hermann was so brilliant with orchestral color that it can hide the underlying composition. He is very good at taking very small musical "cells" and transforming them. The transformation becomes the music. How he "hides his tracks" with the extensive repetition is one area where I always feel he excels.

I am sure you much more trained at this than. But let's say you have 4 two measure phrases. Let's give each a letter (A,B,C,D)
Now think of all the permeations possible. ( _ = silence)

ABCD
AABA
AAAB
_AAB
__A_
BACD
CDBA
ADAC

ETC. ...........

Listen to the following piece of music, and just mentally observe two areas: Repetition and Transition.

I wish you all the best !!

 

Happy to help. For context I'm not a professional composer, just desperate to learn how to get these tunes out of my head and wrestled into an intelligible form. When I joined the forum I struggled a bit with how I could add value since I'm on the early part of the learning curve for many aspects. But I decided I could at least offer my ears, time, encouragement and feedback of what I hear. So I will miss things that are in my own blind spots but thankfully we have a generous group here with a variety of skills. Plus, selfishly, I get to learn a lot in the process of trying to transcribe and articulate what I hear in a piece.

 

Cool..... Let me circle back to you. Just letting you know I have read your comments, and will reply as soon as I have the proper time to do so.

Cheers !

 

Ok Craig

You seem like a cool dude, and you replied to my first comment nicely (not with "Web Browsing Bravado") so here are some suggestions.

Of course......treat this like a buffet at a diner. Take what you want leave behind anything that does not work for you.

My initial advise would be to take each of your modules and see how much you can stretch out of them. Don't worry about form, or how they will fit together yet. Think of it like brainstorms on "sticky notes" that can be deleted or rearranged later.

You can be systematic if you wish, or intuitive. I find list's helpful so here are some possible devices you can experiment with:

Retrograde
Inversion
Retrograde inversion
Transposition
Augmentation
Diminution
Ornamentation
Fragmentation
Repetition
Repetition and fragmentation
Extension

Interval contraction
Interval expansion
Pitch displacement
Register Displacement
Rhythmic alteration
Permutation
Hocketing
resulting patterns (Having one pattern which you delete notes to make new sounding patterns; A la Steve Reich)

Those are just some. Of course this does not address the larger question of "Why" you would want to do one or the other, but that's too big a topic for me to tackle with this post.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, the same must be true with sound.

Forgive any errors, but I had a listen to your 4 modules, and just due to my lazy-ness I just picked the 1st one.....because it was the first and I could not be fucked to think about it any deeper than that.

(Again forgive any errors in what you hear below. I just transcribed it as quick as I could)

So now working with module 1: I am thinking about some of the devices in Psycho's opening. One of my favorite moments is when we hear the theme the 2nd time, but now instead of being in the violins we hear it in the Cello. (I am referring to the strict quarter note theme)

So....let's apply that to your module.
What you will hear is your version, then I simply take your bass line and put it up top. I take your melody and put it on the bottom for the bass.

Next, you have a cool 3 note motif at the end of your phrase (F-G-C I believe) So I will take that, and repeat it 3 x's each time going an octave higher.
Then a 4th time but alternating the motive between the low section and the high.

Next.... I take your module --- delete the melody, and simply notate it out at twice the speed, so we get 16th notes. I then repeat this 3 x's.

I'll repeat it a 4th doing the same trick as before with the registers, but moving downwards now instead of up.

Since I made your music faster, now I will take the melody and make it twice as long via rhythmic augmentation. I get 4 measures instead of 2.

For Ex. 2: I take your inner line (I'll call it alto) and double the duration of it. Then , and this is the only spot I do anything like this, I simply composed a little progression around the figure. Just to show you can take something and change the mood of the music. So it can sound sweet or nostalgic etc.

Ex. 3: is simply another variation on your module. For the harmony..... I am not thinking chords or anything like that. I simply took your melody and stacked it. The chord you hear is your melody stacked vertically. I did not change anything. Then I fuck around with the meters. Lastly, the other thing that caught my ear was your bass line and the leaps vs semitone steps. So I modified slightly your bass line, and then used a cannon technique to displace by an 8th notes to give a disorienting effect, which I felt was needed as it was getting too regular.

Anyhow.....music below. I did one "quick and nasty" version for strings.

The main point it: Except for ex. 2 , I DID NOT COMPOSE ANYTHING. THIS IS ALL YOUR MUSIC.

Hope this is of some help. BH's score are wonderfully transparent. Once you know what to look for they become pretty obvious most of the time.
Take from his bag of tricks, and of course make up your own.

I wish you all the best

Doug

 

Man, I ought to pay you for this stuff. Thanks for posting!

Your BH video is immensely insightful, I think I've watched it 5 or 6 times now. Out of curiosity, are the modules in, i.e. the Psycho prelude varying in the same manner that you've posted here? I.e. variations on the same idea between modules, or is that only happening within modules as the modules repeat? I suspect the former, but I wonder if compositions like this tend to be a piecing together of ideas, or if ideas (modules) are written specifically for one another.

 

Hey Rohann. Umm..... I am just trying to make I understand the question properly.

I am just tempted to say "all of the above"

Here is the "scheme" for the prelude. It's also in the video.



So it is saying A will proceed to B. B will go to C or D, C goes to A or B, and D goes to A or C.


Now the modules in and of them selves will have variations. Let's pick module D for example.
So we could extend the image above to include D1,D2,D3,D4 ETC.

Here is the first time we hear module D in the piece



Now later in the work


Thats the Cello playing the line. Both of these are module "D". We will hear these as being related. I had to pick funny spots to take the pic
as they go to a new system. Bar 113 is bar 79 just an octave lower. Thus 115 is 81.


I don't know if this is of any use. I made this powerpoint for a school called "School of Visual Arts" in NYC, when they asked me to do a presentation. Here is the power point exported as a movie. There are long spots of silence as those were controlled by my clicker, and I was speaking about this.

Just browse thru stopping every 20-30 seconds and it should be fine

Cheers !

Doug

 

If these are any help, here is the score to what I did. Please remember it was done "off the cuff" so the notation is a little sloppy.

But should be enough to deduce the material

 

Doug: Thanks a bunch, they are indeed useful. Wish I could hear your whole presentation but the slideshow is quite helpful on its own. The rest of the material you've provided has resulted in me concentrating on a "modules" study, so I really appreciate it.

I'd actually love to know, for someone that didn't get formal classical training, what kind of "concentrated studies" you'd recommend doing and how to go about them. I.e. "modules" -- transcribe BH and compare to your score, analyze modules and their changes (again using your work as a comparison), and then attempting it myself?
I'm wondering if you have any more guidelines in the same manner for other "studies". I'm realizing I haven't been really focusing enough on particular ideas to understand them thoroughly, instead spending too much time dabbling.

PS: Really curious about the addition of the Walking Dead, Tron and Dark Knight theme at the end -- what were you saying in that regard? I actually do like the Walking Dead theme; as much as it's simple, I think it does convey well the feeling of unending, unchanging dread present throughout the show.